Solid State Drives (SSD) and You

I had an interesting meeting the other day with SanDisk to talk about their G3 Family of SSD or solid state drives. My belief that SSD use was limited to gamers and enterprises with deep pockets is starting to change. SanDisk is about to make SSDs much more attractive by offering units with increased speed and capacity and decreased price.

SSD is basically a a big chunk of memory in a self contained unit that your computer sees as a hard drive. Remember, memory speed is measure in nanoseconds where hard drive speed is measured in milliseconds so SSDs can read and write data up to 250x faster than a conventional hard drive. Plus, memory is more energy efficient (no moving parts) so in a laptop you get better battery life with SSD. And memory is more reliable.

The problem with adoption, until now, has been price. SanDisk is going to cut the price basically in half by offering:

60 GB for $149

120 GB for $249

240 GB for $499

As a reference point, I paid almost $700 when I added a 120 GB hard drive to my Lenovo X200.

With SSD, you get a lighter laptop with faster disk access (cutting boot time by 75%), that is somewhat more rugged and way more energy efficient.

Look for more sub-notebooks and notebooks to start packing bigger and faster SSDs.